After one storm, and maybe another to come, a pause in Lino Lakes
By Mike Kaszuba
On a wintry Monday in February 2022 the City Council in Lino Lakes, a suburb north of Minneapolis, got its first look at plans to build a 707-home subdivision on a sprawling sod farm.
Eight citizens got up to speak on the proposal, with most concerned about the impact on an adjoining neighborhood. The mayor was not happy about the possibility that it would be a gated community. The project, known as the Promenade, quietly fizzled by the end of that year.
Two years later, a new development on mostly the same property – now known as Madinah Lakes, and featuring a mosque and a new developer, Faraaz Yussuf – brought an altogether different reaction. As overflow crowds attended city meetings, a log of public comments was sprinkled with blunt opinions. One person said that “the last thing we need is that mosque.” Another said they were “not going [to] listen to their [Muslim] morning prayer” being broadcast. And still another promised that the City Council “will get voted out if they approve it.”
At city hall Katie Larsen, the city’s planner, wrote in an email that “I’m getting bombarded with phone calls.”
Public Record Media (PRM), a non-profit based in Saint Paul, reviewed thousands of pages of emails and other correspondence involving the Lino Lakes controversy. The documents laid bare the actions of frazzled city officials, the moves by citizens wanting police to criminally investigate Yussuf and the pleas for calm by other participants as the city spent four months last year wrestling with what to do.
At one point, the city brought in a risk mitigation company to help quickly formulate a communications plan to make Lino Lakes “open” and “honest.” Despite that, according to the documents, the city wrestled with media members over public data requests and tightened access to city officials for interviews as the issue intensified.
As the media, including the New York Times, placed a spotlight on the community – in some cases, casting the drama as a clash of cultures reflective of a divided America -- city officials tried to find a way to diffuse emotions. In the end, the city last summer adopted a one-year moratorium on development in Lino Lakes that put a pause on the project.
“Our children are watching,” Cathy and Erik Broberg, two local residents, wrote in an email to the city as the Madinah Lakes development made headlines. “The world is watching.”
As the moratorium now enters its final months, the website for Madinah Lakes -- with a prominent picture of the planned mosque -- says, simply, “Coming Soon.”
“We fully intend to move forward once the moratorium is lifted,” Yussuf told PRM in a March 2025 email. “Our proposed development was exactly what was desired in the current [city] Comprehensive Plan, and [is] open to any and all individuals.”
Since the moratorium began, the city meanwhile has been busy debating a new master planning process for the area, known as Mapping NW Main. A city spokesperson said Yussuf has been included as a “stakeholder” in the discussions. A City Council work session and an open house to discuss the city’s plans were recently held, with the open house drawing roughly 80 people.
But the city spokesperson said Madinah Lakes, which remains the proverbial elephant in the room, was not part of the discussion at the two events.
Whatever unfolds next, it is unlikely to match an early promotional description that proclaimed: “Welcome to Madinah Lakes, [where] every day unfolds as a celebration of harmony, diversity, and possibility.”
While many residents had opposed Madinah Lakes because of traditional traffic, density and over-development concerns, some voiced opposition to Yussuf, the proposed mosque and the feeling that the project would create a large Muslim community that would be unwelcoming to others. Others also questioned Yussuf’s relative lack of development experience. Still more people – including city officials -- were startled at reports early on that Yussuf had begun marketing homes before the city had even formally discussed Madinah Lakes.
Citing safety to use a back entrance at city hall
Emotions ran high.
In a May 2024 email, a member of the city’s environmental board told city officials that “I am concerned about my own safety” and the safety of his colleagues on the board as a meeting approached. The board member, Alexander Schwartz, asked if he and other board members could park and enter city hall through a back entrance in order to avoid the expected crowd.
“We can accommodate this,” wrote John Swenson, the city’s public safety director, “but we will need to have all board members in the back lot at one defined time.”
As critics and supporters of Madinah Lakes squared off, city officials tried – with only some success -- to make sure they were not caught in the crossfire.
Many of the emails obtained by PRM however showed that they were often caught in the middle.
In a late March 2024 email, one person questioned whether city officials were moving Madinah Lakes through the approval process without telling residents. “Something doesn’t seem to be lining up,” Ashlee Oliveira wrote to Larsen, the city planner. “[Either] the city is moving things along in [some] capacity and not admitting to it or this gentleman {Yussuf] is telling a bunch of BS.”
A month later, as tensions rose, city officials began drafting a city communications plan that emphasized the need for the city to be objective.
One key point of the plan: “Stay out of the religious arguments, whatever they are.”
The plan was forwarded to the city by Steve Linders of the Axtell Group, a Minnesota risk mitigation company that among other things specializes in crisis communication strategies and “safeguarding” reputations.
The plan, in outlining the predicament the city was in, suggested Yussuf – at least, in part – had left Lino Lakes “facing a communications challenge.” The developer, the plan stated, “began marketing the development before submitting a proposal to the city”, and had “originally branded the development as Islam-centric, which made the proposal controversial among some residents.”
The goal, the plan added, was to “position Lino Lakes as open, honest and transparent.”
Emails meanwhile showed that city officials busily monitored Facebook accounts to track group discussions on Madinah Lakes, and also discussed creating a separate web page to post city updates on the development.
“It will cause a frenzy of comments. However, I think it’s better we get in front of it and be transparent,” Andrea Turner, a city communications specialist, said in a March 25, 2024 email.
“Turn off comments?” suggested another city official.
“As [a] government we can’t,” replied Turner.
As spring moved into summer, the intensity remained.
When a New York Times reporter in July notified the city he wanted to attend a key City Council meeting, he was told to arrive early. “We have a very small [chamber] and usually reach max capacity,” Meg Sawyer, a city official, explained. “Typically people are lined up by 4:30pm to make sure they get a ‘ticket’ to sit in the chambers.
“We hand out tickets at 5:30pm,” she added.
Defining a media member
With social media often driving the news cycle, Lino Lakes wrestled with the different types of media representatives who were interested in Madinah Lakes.
“How [would you] define a ‘media member’?,” asked one city official. “How do you let KARE 11 [a well-known local television station] in and not a blogger?”
The city likewise found itself trying to respond to a series of public data requests, including those from media outlets that focused its coverage on immigrants and communities of color and now were curious about what was happening in Lino Lakes.
The data requests showed how much Madinah Lakes was consuming the discussion at city hall.
In trying to fulfill one data request, city officials found 869 items related to Madinah Lakes scattered across 114 electronic mailboxes.
The city meanwhile stepped gingerly when it received a detailed request from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a nationwide group founded to advance American Muslim civil rights and which had an office in Minneapolis.
Part of CAIR’s request focused on the Promenade, the former development proposal in 2022 which had since been abandoned but was located on essentially the same property where Madinah Lakes would be built. The request asked for, not only meeting minutes and recordings, but also all “emails, text messages, social media messages or posts” from city employees, advisory board members, elected officials and experts or consultants.
CAIR’s data request attempted to probe into a suspicion held by supporters of Madinah Lakes: That Madinah Lakes was being treated differently than the since-scuttled Promenade development had been.
“The request is voluminous, and the City is currently shorthanded,” Sarah Cotton, the city administrator, wrote to Alec Shaw, a CAIR official, in a May 2024 email.
“The request will likely not only require a significant amount of staff time to research and pull together the information requested,” Cotton wrote, “but each item will also need to be reviewed to assure no private data is being released.”
Shaw, according to city emails, would eventually be asked to pre-pay $575.60 for the data.
City officials also found themselves dealing with the Sahan Journal, a non-profit media outlet based in Minnesota that covers immigrants and communities of color.
In April 2024, Sahan Journal reporter Katelyn Vue asked Larsen, the city planner, to do a phone interview regarding Madinah Lakes. “I'm hoping to avoid emailed responses and doing a phone/virtual or in-person interview,” wrote Vue.
Staff “not available for interviews”
Replied Larsen: “Staff is not available for interviews.”
Vue then submitted six written questions, which Larsen responded to in writing. “Please see City responses below in red,” Larsen wrote.
The documents show that other, more traditional media outlets, like Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), likewise tussled with the city over public data requests.
MPR reporter Ellie Roth made a data request regarding Madinah Lakes, and more than once asked that the city waive the $86.34 pre-paid charge for copies because the documents were “in the public interest.” The city denied the waiver.
Roth then asked in a June 4, 2024 email when she could instead inspect the documents, which under state law could be done free of charge. Cotton, the city administrator, replied that the first day the city could accommodate her would be June 28 – more than three weeks later.
“Looking at staff schedules, our first available date” is June 28 for two hours, from 9 to 11 a.m. “Does this work for you?” Cotton asked.
On July 2, Roth then asked the city’s development director, Michael Grochala, for an interview on Madinah Lakes. A city official told Roth that Grochala was unavailable until at least early August, a month later.
Similarly, when the Minnesota Star Tribune asked City Council member Dale Stoesz for comment on Madinah Lakes and the proposed moratorium, Stoesz sent an email to Cotton and others at City Hall.
“I'm not responding,” Stoesz wrote, “but perhaps the city has provided a statement perhaps not.”
Among other things, the newspaper asked Stoesz what he thought “about how the project has created a divide at recent council meetings among the public commenters?”
Not all media outlets tussled with city officials. The emails showed that the city’s relationship was somewhat different with North Metro TV, a local public access television operation that broadcasts local government meetings in the northern Twin Cities suburbs, including Lino Lakes.
“[I was] just alerted [to] this post on the CAIR-MN site. Thought you should see it if you haven't already,” Eric Houston, the interim co-executive director of North Metro TV, wrote in a July 8, 2024 email to city officials. The CAIR-MN website, according to Houston, spoke of an upcoming Lino Lakes meeting where the City Council was expected to vote on the building moratorium. The website posting, he added, stated that “hundreds of project supporters” were supposed to attend.
“Thank you for the heads up, Eric,” wrote Sawyer, the city’s human resources and communications manager.
A lawyer for Yussuf meanwhile described what he too saw as a double standard.
In May 2024, the lawyer challenged the city’s proposed moratorium, saying city officials had long known that the property – a sod farm -- would likely be developed and were leaning towards a moratorium only because of the controversy involving Madinah Lakes.
“Since at least October 2006, the City has been aware of developer interest in these parcels for re-development as residential housing and some supportive retail and institutional uses,” wrote Matthew Duffy, an attorney for Yussuf.
“In fact, the City reviewed a concept plan [at the time] titled the “Robinson Lakes” that included a mixed use development north and south of Main Street, that included 680 acres of development,” Duffy wrote said.
Duffy also pointed to the since-scuttled Promenade development. As the Promenade was being considered by the city in 2022, said Duffy, the city decided that an environmental impact statement for it was unnecessary.
“Nowhere in the [preliminary environmental study] or the Findings of Fact does the City mention that the Promenade project should be suspended in favor of an Interim Ordinance/Moratorium,” like what was being proposed for Madinah Lakes, wrote Duffy.
Yussuf meanwhile also became a target.
As tensions rose, Luke Walter, a leader of the Love Lino Lakes citizens group, sent an email to local law enforcement officials wanting an investigation into Yussuf’s “fraudulent and criminal activities.” Walter said his group “would be willing to provide law enforcement [with] documents and information gathered by the group.”
Yussuf had described his troubled past to the New York Times, including his guilty plea to theft by swindle, a felony. But, according to the newspaper, Yussuf said that he had since informally changed his name, had successfully petitioned to have his felony reduced to a misdemeanor and had begun a successful business career by joining the building trades.
“Not opening an investigation”
“I did send this to [our investigators] for review and they consulted with the county attorney’s office,” Bill Jacobson, the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office chief deputy, wrote regarding Walter’s email. “Based on the information provided, we will not be opening an investigation.”
Walker would also complain that representatives of Madinah Lakes had presented material that was copyrighted by another company and that their actions “appear to be a breach of their ethics.”
Yussuf had his own complaints about the project’s opponents.
As the city began to review the project in April 2024, Yussuf told city officials that his supporters were at one point blocked from entering a city meeting by opponents. “This past Monday,” Yussuf wrote in an April 28 email, “many of the supporters that showed up later during the meeting were turned away at the door by community folks asking for IDs and refusing to let them in.”
With the controversy intensifying, Yussuf’s wife would also weigh in.
In an April 2024 email to the city’s engineer, Sarah Shahid said that “it is disheartening” to watch what was happening in Lino Lakes and added that “despite our proactive outreach through various communication channels, regrettably, we have yet to engage in constructive discourse with interested parties.”
Shahid added: “I urge you to evaluate the proposal based on its inherent merits rather than succumb to unfounded conjecture surrounding [my husband’s] past.“
The controversy though did have at least one lighter moment.
At the end of May 2024, a representative from Hirshfield’s, a Minnesota-based paint company, contacted Larsen. “I was reaching out to discuss the Madinah Lakes development project in Lino Lakes,” Hirshfield’s Kent Zylstra wrote to Larsen, the city planner. “I was wanting to get involved in regards to paint related needs for this project.”
Larsen forwarded the email to Yussuf.
“I’ll let you reach out to them if you want,” she told Yussuf. “Not sure you’re ready to pick out paint colors yet.”
(Supporting documents for this article can be accessed by contacting Public Record Media at admin@publicrecordmedia.org , or at 651-556-1381)